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Rage Quitting: Either Put Up Punishments or Make it Pointless

May 25, 2014

Rage quitting has been an obnoxious tendency ever since playing against other people has existed. It’s easy to understand why someone would like to do this, as in most games, when you leave them in the middle of the match, you aren’t credited with a loss. However, in games where a win/loss ratio is not as popular, why is it still a thing?

The picture above shows a message more common than the “Thanks for playing!” message at the end of each round.

The game above is a Wheel of Fortune game inside of the platform Roblox. This game is like the real Wheel of Fortune, but has Roblox stuff as well as other stuff. There is a leaderboard that spans all of the servers, totaling all of the money earned and ranking people based off of that. The game itself is fun, and I found myself memorizing almost every puzzle by the 3rd time I saw it. People seem to have fun whenever they’re playing.

However, at the end of the game, the person who earned the most money gets to do the final puzzle. The person is then given a chance to choose a few letters and a vowel, and they have 45 seconds to try and solve the puzzle. In most cases, assuming the game has lasted that long, the people not in the final puzzle face leave the game. That ends the game, and gives no money for the leaderboard. And, to make matters worse, there’s no reason for people to stay in the game, because they don’t get a lot of money and they don’t participate. So, finishing a game is about the chance of catching a shiny Pokemon.

I’ve tweeted to the creator of the game, asking him if he needed help with people who quit mid game, but he seemed to ignore me. It SEEMS like something easy to implement, since it already tracks who is in the game and ends the game when there’s only one person. It should be able to punish people who leave the game, but he has implemented nothing.

This is not exclusive to that one game. In a whole lot of games, people will leave when they have milked everything they can out of it, regardless of what that would do to other people. This is an issue that, while some games address it, needs to be addressed by a larger group. For example, games on a larger platform, such as Xbox Live or Steam, should be able to submit reports of quitting mid-game, which can be appealed. If a person is to receive enough of these strikes, there there would be further punishment, such as a temporary ban or revocation of certain permissions.

While these systems are not flawless, something like this needs to be put in or games need to make it so quitting doesn’t mess up the games of others. It has enraged a lot of other people, so I felt that I needed to say something.